Gaby, who runs the Lotto scratch-card and cigarette shop, said, “He comes in occasionally, so he might surprise us. He could pop in at any time.”
“Does he gamble?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Gaby.
James at the Pizza Hut said, “He was up working at the hot springs last time I heard.”
But the people at the Chena Hot Springs Resort said they hadn’t seen him.
Charlie Livingston, the taxidermist, told me he got hit by a car but he’s fine now.
My hunt for Kris Kringle was proving fruitless. People kept telling me they’d just seen him, and he was a wonderful man, but I never saw him. I began to wonder if he even existed. And then I visit the school for excluded children on the edge of town.
“Do you know where Kris Kringle is?” I ask Suze, the teacher.
She looks a little awkward and shuffles uneasily on her feet.
“Have you looked him up on the Internet?” she says.
“No?” I say.
“I think he—uh—died,” says Suze.
“No,” I say. “That’s impossible. People keep telling me they just saw him.”
“I’m sorry to break it to you,” Suze says, “and it might be the absence of Christmas decorations that allows me to say this, but I think Santa is dead. He passed away this summer.”
There is a silence.
“Well, the taxidermist did say he was hit by a car,” I say. “But he also said he recovered fine.” I pause. “Does everyone know and they’re not saying?”
“They might know and they don’t want to say,” Suze says, nodding.
“Like a town-wide conspiracy?” I say.
“Maybe,” says Suze. She looks a little embarrassed.
“I am amazed,” I say. “All this week people I’ve become good friends with have been looking me in the eye and saying, ‘I’m sure I saw him a couple of days ago.’”
“I can’t believe I’m the only person to have owned up to it,” says Suze. She sighs. “The one that burst the bubble. I hope they don’t ride me out of town.”
In the end I go to the library and find conflicting reports from the local paper. One report says Kris Kringle survived a car crash this summer and moved south. The other report says he died in the car crash. I never do find out for certain whether Kris Kringle is alive or not.
• • •
IT IS SUNDAY, my last day in North Pole. Today, finally, a new Santa will be occupying the vacant seat at Santa Claus House. He is a fantastic Santa. He looks just as Santa should. The setting is perfect: a red velvet chair, presents piled up under the tree, etc. Santa’s helper Cerys the elf is here, too, in a pink elf suit, with pink circles painted on her cheeks.
I introduce myself to Cerys. My plane home is in a few hours, and so Cerys is my last chance of finding out whether Kris Kringle is alive or dead. She’d know, because she would have been his elf when he used to work here.
“Cerys,” I say. “Do you know where Kris Kringle is?”
“I do,” she says, a big smile on her face.
“Oh!” I say.
“He’s right here in Santa Claus House,” says Cerys.
“Oh?” I say, looking around. “Where?”
“He’s right on that chair over there,” says Cerys.
She points at the new Santa.
“That’s Kris Kringle,” says Cerys. “That’s Santa. They’re one and the same. OK?”
“I understand,” I say.
She introduces me to the new Santa. “Do you remember Jon when he was a little boy?” she asks him.
“Oh yes,” Santa says. “I remember Jon. He took a little convincing that I was real.”
“That’s true!” I say. “Very early on, when I was four, I told the rest of my class that you didn’t exist.”
Santa gasps. “Come here,” he says. “Pull my beard.”
I do. “It’s real,” I say.
“And what town are you in?” Santa asks.
“North Pole,” I say.
“And this particular building is . . . ?”
“Santa Claus House,” I say.
“So,” says Santa. “If you’re in a real North Pole, in a real Santa Claus House, and Santa has a real beard, that must make me . . . real.”
Most of the children here are very young, but there are two older girls in the crowd. I ask them how old they are.
“Thirteen,” they say.
That’s the same age as the plotters. I remember what Jessie said about how being a letter-writing elf at the age of twelve ruined her belief in Santa, and then I remember what Jeff Jacobson said about how kids of that age are savvy, and they know fact from fantasy.
So I decide to put it to the test.
“Do you believe in Santa?” I ask them.
There is a long silence.
“Half and half,” says one.
“Yes,” says the other.
Phoning a Friend
In November 2001, when Major Charles Ingram, his wife, Diana, and another man, Tecwen Whittock, were arrested attempting to cheat the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? out of a million pounds using an elaborate system of audience-based coughs, my mother called me to say, “You know them! You were at school with them!”
“With who?” I asked.
“Diana Ingram’s brothers, Adrian and Marcus Pollock,” she said. “You must remember Diana Pollock. Their cousin Julian lived around the corner from us. You must remember them.”
“No,” I said.
The next day it dawned on me that this was an in that money couldn’t buy, so I wrote to the Ingrams, reminding them of our halcyon days together.
“My family and I are experiencing a very real nightmare,” Charles wrote back. “I have no doubt that there is a case to prove against media manipulation after consideration of the content, its cyclical nature, the care taken to quickly undermine expressions of support, the outrageous leaking of privileged information, and so on.”
Charles wrote that perhaps I was the journalist to prove that case. I reread the letter. Its cyclical nature? It seemed curiously over-erudite, as if Charles wanted to prove that he was the sort of person clever enough to legitimately win a million pounds. I had no idea what he meant.
Still, it was odd. Diana, Adrian, and Marcus Pollock attended the same synagogue I did. They were well-to-do in an ordinary way. What happened to them? I did, in fact, have some vague memory, some Pollock-related to-do that rocked the local Jewish community when I was about ten. It was something to do with a car with the number plate APOLLO G and the manufacture of watch straps. But I couldn’t remember anything more than that, and neither could my mother.
• • •
THURSDAY AFTERNOON, March 20, 2003, Southwark Crown Court, is when it all goes wrong for Charles Ingram. He’s being cross-examined by prosecuting barrister Nicholas Hilliard about Particular Coughs 12 to 14. Those of us who’ve attended this long, slow trial from the beginning know the coughs so well we can mouth them: The tape of Charles’s appearance on Millionaire has been played nearly a dozen times. During Charles’s tenure in the hot seat, 192 coughs rang out from the audience: 173 were, experts agree, innocent clearings of throats, etc. But nineteen have been termed Particular Coughs.
Perhaps the most devastating of all is Particular Cough 12. It arose during Chris Tarrant’s £500,000 question: “Baron Haussmann is best known for his planning of which city? Rome, Paris, Berlin, Athens.”
“I think it’s Berlin,” Charles immediately, and confidently, replied. “Haussmann is a more German name than Italian or Parisian or Athens. I’d be saying Berlin if I was at home watching this on TV.”
This is when Cough 12 occurred. It sounds, from the tape, like a cough born from terrible frustration. If the prosecution case is true, the plan was for Charles to chew over the answers out loud and for Tecwen Whittock—sitting behind him in a Fastest Finger First seat—to cough after the correct one. But now it seemed that Charles was going to plump straight for Berlin.